Jon Moxley Explains Why He Hates WWE’s Promo Style

When Jon Moxley left WWE in 2019 he made it abundantly clear he was unhappy with how the creative process worked over there. One of his biggest issues was the scripted promos, and it’s a big reason why a promo Moxley delivers on AEW Dynamite is significantly different from what post-Shield Dean Ambrose was delivering on the mic each week. While serving as guest host on a recent episode of Oral Sessions, Moxley explained his contempt for how WWE writes promos for its wrestlers.

“As far as what to put in and whatnot, it’s kinda like a wrestling match or like a promo,” Moxley said (h/t Inside The Ropes). “That’s why WWE promos f—ing suck because they jam 5,000 f—ing words in there that aren’t necessary. Say what you want to say, mean what you want to say, get your point across. ‘I’m gonna beat your a— on Saturday night because I don’t like you.’ Boom, done.”

“And sometimes in a match, it’s like okay, we planned out all these f—ing spots but really, what is the story? What are we trying to get [across]? You’re the good guy, I’m the bad guy, you’re big, you’re small, you’re tall, you’re short — whatever the contrast of styles or the story we’re telling,” he continued. “Why do we have all [this]? Sometimes, you just look at it and go ‘We don’t need all that extra s—.’”

One person who defends the idea of scripted promos is Paul Heyman, who was asked about it while on the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch recently.

“That’s, again, something without a perfect answer,” Heyman said. “Vince McMahon owns a content creation conglomerate that now has on the table in application three separate billion-dollar deals. And I’m sure he’s working on more. Knowing Vince he’s probably trying to envision the first trillion-dollar content output deal. … When you have such deals you have to protect those deals from someone else screwing them up. So if Mr. or Mrs. or Miss X goes out to the ring and on live television or a live stream says something that is egregiously wrong and it gets through or it’s said in front of all these witnesses and it causes a major scandal and, ‘Cancel Culture’ or not, deservedly gets WWE thrown off of FOX or NBCU or Peacock and blows a billion-dollar deal, who’s to blame besides Vince McMahon for not saying, ‘I want to know what this person is going to say before they say it.’”